The upstream 5.6 has been released. Information about CentOS 5.6 will be posted here when it is available. Meanwhile, the curious may want to follow CentOS on Twitter and discussions on the centos-devel ML.

Based on feedback, we seem to have general consensus that getting 5.6/ to mirrors first is the way to go. However, this does not mean that work on 6.0 will stop, we will try and get the isos ready - but we might need to give the mirrors a bit of a break before releasing those as well.

I begin this announcement with my personal apology to all who are reading this. A while ago, I had a short conversation with Karanbir [Singh] with regards to the current status of the CentOS 5.6 build. He provided me with some information in relation to both the C-5.6 & C-6.0 build processes and asked me to write it up for public consumption via the Announcement forum. Due to various personal issues, coupled with the need to replace the main disk drive in my usual (desktop) workstation, the posts to the Announcement forum slid down my ToDo list. I aim to rectify that now.

In the (boxed) text that follows, KB's words appear in italics. My linking works are bracketed in the normal font: [thus].

[I would refer to those last few iterations as the "final polish". Once that process is complete,the tree will be made available to the QA team for verification. Assuming that all the boxes canthen be ticked in QA,] [i]we can start seeding for[/i] [the] [i]release[/i] [of CentOS] [i]5.6 within seven days.[/i][All being well, CentOS 5.6 should be released by the end of February 2011. It would have to be a majorproblem to cause C-5.6 to be delayed until March. So the advice is not to formulate plans based on myguestimate but, instead, hope for the best whilst being prepared for the worst.]

There was a particularly nasty bug in anaconda for 5.6 that we wereworking on for almost a week with new distro/iso spins at least once aday during this period. We seem to have finally fixed this problem andwe are getting good tests with the i386 now.

[i]We should have 4.9 out either today or tomorrow and then 5.6 immediately afterthat, as the mirror traffic clears out. Should not be too long given that the actualupdate delta from 4.8 -> 4.9 is exceptionally small. ( It's under 300 MB per mirror! )[/i]

I'm sure that I do not have to remind readers that "slippage" can still occur. So my "guestimate" is CentOS 4.9 by the end of this week and CentOS 5.6 at the beginning of next week.